Besides, it isn't hearsay, the allegations have been made by some of the victims. Hearsay is something else.
And I can fully believe everyone reporting problems believes they are right while withholding judgment as to whether their interpretation of their situations, which were generally highly emotional and formed during extreme stress, is entirely consistent with reality once the other side has a chance to state their case. We should always get both sides. Humans aren't very good at representing stressful situations with other humans objectively.
What I was attempting to communicate is that there are a few first hand accounts, and numerous news articles and blogs expounding on what those mean. I didn't mean to imply that those that had those experiences were not referring to their own experiences, or that they were being untruthful, but I understand how either of those might have been interpretations of my words. I'll leave them as they are because I don't believe in whitewashing, and let this stand as the correction.
While I think it's important to get both sides of the story, I don't view both sides with the same level of trust. I think those with the accusations are far more likely to have accounts closer to reality in this case, but closer to reality doesn't mean they are accurate representations of the situation when taken by themselves. Confirmation bias is real, and doesn't have to have such an extreme effect as to change someone's opinion to still have a large effect on how people perceive the situation.
I'm not holding out much hope of getting clarity from the investigation.
It's probably important to consider that even with those numbers, you wouldn't know whether it was scapegoating or not. All they would do would be to allow you to make assumptions, which is more about your preconceptions of what you think they should find than the facts.
> The problem with Uber isn't that some employees engage in sexual harassment. The problem is that there's a culture where sexual harassment isn't taken seriously, is tolerated if the perpetrators are "high performing"...
See, this may be true, but we don't know this. The point of an investigation is to find this out. Since the investigation in question here is internal, and I'd hazard that most of us don't necessarily harbor any hope that an entirely truthful response will come out of it (I for one wouldn't really expect that from a company I thought was more responsible than Uber), but that doesn't mean we should act like probabilities (and probabilities that are rooted in human behavior that is understood to any statistical degree by almost anyone in my opinion), we should be careful about the certainty we represent those outcomes.
In other words, it's all a big swirling mess of hearsay at this point. The problem could be fairly localized but widely publicized, or much more widespread as you state. We don't really know.